A Tea Party with a Theme: How Universal Is Universal?
The end of the Human Rights Commission’s first session marked the beginning of work to draft an International Bill of Rights (February 1947). “Thinking that our work might be helped by an informal atmosphere,” Eleanor recalled in her autobiography, “I asked a small group to meet in my apartment for tea.” Chinese representative P. C. Chang, John Humphrey, a Canadian who also served as the permanent head of the United Nations Division of Human Rights, and Charles Malik of Lebanon comprised the group.
That night, in Eleanor’s apartment, the discussion between the learned members became more abstract and philosophical, and Eleanor, amused, sat back and enjoyed the exchange. Humphrey later wrote that
Chang and Malik were too far apart in their philosophical approaches to be able to work together on a text. There was a great deal of talk, but we were getting nowhere. Then, after still another cup of tea, Chang suggested that I put my other duties aside for six months and study Chinese philosophy . . . [which] was his way of saying that Western influence might be too great, and he was looking at Malik as he spoke. There was some more discussion mainly of a philosophical character, Mrs. Roosevelt saying little and continuing to pour tea.16
Rather than start a Confucian study group, it was decided that Humphrey would write a draft for the commission to discuss. Fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and French legal traditions, and well versed in civil and common law, Humphrey and his staff were prepared to tackle this task. But they still had much to learn, and they embarked on a study of “all the world’s existing constitutions and rights instruments, as well as suggestions that had poured in to the Secretariat from members of the Commission, outside organizations, and even from various interested individuals.”17
Eleanor and Dr. P. C. Chang of China at the first session of the Drafting Committee on the International Bill of Rights at Lake Success, New York, on June 9, 1947.
UN Photo
Their work mirrored a concurrent study being conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In June 1947, UNESCO set up a Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights to study the world’s cultures, sending questionnaires to experts around the globe. Replies from scholars, philosophers, and political activists indicated that some rights were protected by all cultures. For example, a Confucian philosopher named Lo Zhongshu wrote:
[t]he problem of human rights was seldom discussed by Chinese thinkers of the past, at least in the same way as it was in the West. There was no open declaration of rights in China, either by individual thinkers or by political constitutions, until this conception was introduced from the West. . . . [However], the idea of human rights developed very early in China. . . . A great Confucianist, Mencius (372–289 BC), strongly maintained that a government should work for the will of the people. He said: “The people are of primary importance. The [ruler] of least importance.” 18
Similarly, the Bengali Muslim poet Humayun Kabir argued that early Islam had “succeeded in overcoming distinction of race and color to an extent experienced neither before nor after.” (According to Kabir, Western ideas about human rights had suffered from a gap between grand notions and less-than-grand practices.)19
While few challenged the UNESCO study’s basic conclusion that the idea of human rights was universal, criticisms quickly arose. What was the basis for human rights? When and how did the concept of human rights originate? Some critics of the document began to suggest that any search for universal traits would obscure the diversity of cultures around the world.
It turned out that many anthropologists, and particularly the American Anthropological Association, feared that any discussion of human values would tend to be dominated by Western ideas, to the detriment of smaller and more vulnerable cultures. In their 1947 Statement on Human Rights, the association offered the following thought:
Because of the great number of societies that are in intimate contact in the modern world, and because of the diversity of their ways of life, the primary task confronting those who would draw up a Declaration on the Rights of Man is thus, in essence, to resolve the following problem: how can the proposed Declaration be applicable to all human beings, and not be a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America? 20
For good reason, the American Anthropological Association suspected that the Declaration would be used by Western nations to justify colonialism. For centuries, the Europeans and Americans dominated Latin American, Asian, and African nations, imposing colonial and semi-colonial arrangements that injured local cultures. The association’s report stated:
Definitions of freedom, concepts of the nature of human rights, and the like, have . . . been narrowly drawn. Alternatives have been decried, and suppressed where controls have been established over non-European peoples. . . . The consequences of this point of view have been disastrous for mankind. Doctrines of the “white man’s burden” 21 have been employed to implement economic exploitation, and to deny the right to control their own affairs to millions of peoples over the world, where the expansion of Europe and America has not meant the literal extermination of whole populations.22
The alleged inferiority of non-Western groups permitted colonialists to present themselves as benevolent guardians, a convenient fiction backed up by a dubious science known as eugenics. This hugely influential set of ideas about racial hierarchies was studied by schoolchildren from San Francisco to Prague, and many of the leading scientists of the day endorsed it.23 Rather than embracing the unity of mankind, eugenics presented a picture of irreconcilable differences. Based on poor science and prejudices, those who believed the principles of eugenics imagined that some races were superior to others, at times resulting in violence against those deemed inferior. This outlook contributed to a worldview that divided humanity along lines of class, race, and ethnicity.
The anthropologists’ statement explained that while all cultures confront similar challenges, ”no two of them, however, do so in exactly the same way, and some of them employ means that differ, often strikingly, from one another.”24 Such striking differences should not be the basis for enmity or intolerance, but rather for an appreciation of the need to value all cultures equally.25
If the American Anthropological Association was correct, and human values depended on very specific cultural characteristics, could there ever be a universal human right? The association’s response was that
[o]nly when a statement of the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions is incorporated into the proposed Declaration…can the next step of defining the rights and duties of human groups as regards each other be set upon the firm foundation of the present-day scientific knowledge of Man.26
This concept that all ideas are of equal value, or cultural relativism, had won over many progressive thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s. Such an idea challenged the mission of Eleanor and her colleagues, since “standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive.” If the “beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole,” then the commission might encounter a basic contradiction between respect for individual cultures and the search for overarching universal traits.27
However powerful these arguments were, World War II and the Holocaust had shown the danger of accepting one group’s claim to superiority over others. Many held that in the aftermath of such events, the need to protect what individuals did share trumped the safeguarding of differences between cultures. Critics of the American Anthropological Association argued that at a time when the future of human civilization itself was threatened, the organization’s position (known commonly as relativism) was untenable. In other words, cultural differences could be tolerated but not necessarily glorified, especially when they denied individuals’ basic rights or threatened the life of groups and individuals.
In December 1948, a lively debate about this issue began as the Third Committee reviewed the Human Rights Commission’s preliminary draft. The Chilean delegate, who had ceaselessly championed the rights of the poor, took on the role of mediator. Hernan Santa Cruz, a progressive judge, had previously presented Humphrey with his government’s version of a human rights bill, but he was now working hard to bridge his colleagues’ views.
The delegate from Uruguay held up the discussion, leveling objection after objection. Eleanor appealed to Santa Cruz, hoping he might convey to the Uruguayan delegate the importance of the Declaration. Santa Cruz “looked at me,” she recalled, and he said,
“I have been on the Human Rights Committee for quite some time and have become accustomed to this document, and you must let him become accustomed to it because it is an Anglo-Saxon document.”
“But,” I protested, “It is the result of eighteen nations and they were not all Anglo-Saxon nations.”
He insisted, “It is still an Anglo-Saxon document. In time, the delegate from Uruguay will grow accustomed to it, but just now he is very much shocked, just as I was when I first read it.”28
This conversation troubled Eleanor. It had never occurred to her that so many negotiations and compromises could produce a document that was one-sided. A veil had been pulled aside, and she saw that her fellow delegates had often felt left out of the discussions. It was imperative, she wrote, that “we should become accustomed to thinking in their terms, as well as having them thinking in our terms.” This idea sat well with her vision of an international body designed to keep war at bay: “That flow backwards and forwards of ideas and understanding,” she reflected, “is one of the great contributions of the United Nations.”29 She expressed this again years later, in a reflection on the labor involved in reconciling different perspectives:
Producing a meeting of the minds on what these rights ought to be was most difficult. That which a country or an individual considers a fundamental right depends much upon the history of freedom in that country, on the stage of political, economic, and social development, and on the political, economic, and social conditions of the moment. The Czarist Government of Russia failed to develop economic prosperity or social equality among the masses of people; it is not unnatural that Communist Russia should emphasize economic and social rights provided by the State. Our own experience was quite different: oppressed American Colonists formed a nation in which the emphasis was on individual rights with a minimum of government.30
Eleanor, in other words, argued that differences in human values reflected stages in society’s struggle to achieve freedom and prosperity. In the course of these struggles, each society or culture tends to highlight or give priority to the rights it deems most important; however, in most cases, the goals remained largely the same. Framing the debate in terms of history and priorities allowed Eleanor much more flexibility and inclusiveness. After all, these were debates about emphasis, not about fundamental differences.
Who Was Peng-chun Chang (Zhang Penjun)?
Chang served as a delegate of China and vice-chairman of the HRC during the drafting of the Declaration. A philosopher, playwright, and diplomat, Chang helped bridge conflicting views of human rights.
UN Photo
Beyond National Sovereignty: How to Protect Citizens From Their Own Government
To make the work more efficient, a smaller group immediately set to work on Humphrey’s draft, a set of 48 articles that became known as the Humphrey Draft.31 The drafting committee met for the first time in June 1947, and its first task was whittling down Humphrey’s long list to something the permanent Human Rights Commission would approve.32
Not all issues were easily resolved. Consider, for instance, the right to freedom of movement. Those who live under democratic governments take for granted their ability to choose where to live, a freedom that also facilitates the movement of workers according to market shifts. But for the USSR delegate, Vladimir M. Koretsky, the inclusion of such a right would undermine a command economy, in which the state decided how labor was assigned. More importantly, telling workers they had a right to move from place to place as they wished, he argued, interfered with the principle of national sovereignty. In other words, it amounted to telling a sovereign state what to do inside its own borders, which he adamantly rejected. While national sovereignty in its ideal form was designed to protect the right of every nation to choose its own destiny, many states committed crimes against their citizens while essentially telling other states to mind their own business.
Still later, when the full Human Rights Commission met for the second time in Geneva late in November 1947, the idea of creating a United Nations International Court of Human Rights upset those who feared that the human rights project would unsettle the authority of the states. The Yugoslav delegate, Ribnikar, warned against attempting to make the United Nations a world government that superseded national sovereignty.33
Humphrey later reflected that the Soviet delegate’s complaints “had, of course, hit the nail right on the head. One purpose of both drafts was to protect individuals from their governments. If the protection of human rights did not mean that, it did not mean much.” The struggle for human rights, he stressed, “has always been and always will be, a struggle against authority.”34
Recent events had left no question that the power of the state had to be curbed. As Raphael Lemkin proved in his furious attempts to outlaw genocide and racial violence, the Nazis had not violated existing international laws when they stripped Jews of citizenship, confiscated their property, and sent them to concentration camps.35 Even the prosecutors at the postwar Nuremburg trials, who worked with outdated international laws, were only able to determine that Nazi officials violated international law with the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the war. So when USSR delegate Vladimir M. Koretsky complained that the commission threatened to interfere with the power of sovereign states, René Cassin’s reply was sharp:
I must state my thoughts very frankly: the right of interference is here; it is in the [United Nations] Charter . . . Why? Because we do not want a repetition of what happened in 1933, [when] Germany began to massacre its own nationals, and everybody . . . bowed, saying “Thou art sovereign and master in thine own house.” 36
This would remain the most sensitive question addressed by the commission. Even once the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, getting states to comply with its requirements would often prove impossible. Many states resisted, and eventually killed, efforts to monitor their human rights records. But what was the point of toiling over international agreements if the signatories all preserved the final say on human rights within their borders? Can internationalism mean anything if no one is willing to surrender some authority to the group?
Civil Rights as Human Rights
While the Human Rights Commission worked on drafting the Declaration, some of those leading the struggle for civil rights in America believed that bringing the case of segregation in America before the United Nations would help draw international attention to their plight. They felt that a change in terminology—from “civil rights” to “human rights”—would align their struggle with that of other oppressed groups and colonized nations around the world. They hoped that the shift would bring pressure on the United States to live up to the ideals and freedoms inscribed in the American Constitution.
Nearly one million black men and women served in World War II, many of whom believed that wartime patriotism would earn them full parity with white Americans upon their return. They also hoped that the struggle to defeat Nazi racism would transform racism on American soil. They were wrong on both counts.
During the war, blacks began more forcefully to demand their citizenship rights. . . . Weary of Jim Crow indignities, many Southern blacks refused to be segregated any longer on streetcars and buses, stood their ground when challenged, and thus provoked almost daily racial altercations. Blacks became less compliant with conventional rules of racial etiquette, finding small but symbolic ways to challenge the racial status quo. Black soldiers, frustrated by the constant racial abuse they suffered, began fighting back; the result was much interracial violence and many deaths.37
The huge industrial boom, precipitated by military production, failed to benefit many black workers and factory owners. In the military, only a few black soldiers were allowed to assume combat roles or become officers. Enough was enough. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 (see Part II), which banned government contractors from discriminating according to race, religion, or national origin, made a big difference. Within three years, two million blacks were reportedly working in the defense industry.38 Extraordinary as this presidential move was, however, the lives of black men and women were little improved when the war ended.
Moreover, hostility toward black veterans increased at the end of the war. The attacks and violence were neither accidental nor simple crimes of passion (although passionate mobs were often involved). They were carried out by whites who were determined to put loyal American veterans “back in their place” and to reinstate segregation. Eleanor was acutely aware of the explosive potential of this racial friction. But now that she was no longer a White House insider, how could she help? The return of these soldiers and their bitterly cold reception highlighted the need for uncompromising action. As the issue of civil rights was forced to the forefront, Eleanor used her popularity, connections, and influence to promote racial and social equality. She participated in conferences, fund-raisers, and public debates to raise awareness about America’s racial problem. She also joined the board of directors of several organizations, including the NAACP.
Columbia, Tennessee, race riots of 1946. The riot in Columbia was incited by the failure of the United States to offer African Americans full equality after so many of them had fought the racist policies of Nazi Germany.
© Getty Images
Frustrated by a country that could demand sacrifice in its moment of need and then turn its back when the crisis passed, black veterans sometimes took direct action. The results could be chilling:
In Alabama, when an African American veteran removed the Jim Crow sign on a trolley, an angry street car conductor took aim and unloaded his pistol into the ex-Marine. As the wounded veteran staggered off the tram and crawled away, the chief of police hunted him down and finished the job . . . In South Carolina, another veteran, who complained about the inanity of Jim Crow transportation, had his eyes gouged out with the butt of the sheriff’s billy club. In Louisiana, a black veteran who defiantly refused to give a white man a war memento was partially dismembered, castrated, and blow-torched…In Columbia, Tennessee, when African Americans refused to “take lying down” the planned lynching of a black veteran who had defended his mother from a beating, the sheriff’s storm troopers . . . “drew up their machine guns and tommy guns . . . fired a barrage of shots directly into the black area of town, and then moved in.” 39
The events in Columbia, Tennessee, were indicative. In this town of 5,000 whites and 3,000 blacks, racial tensions actually subsided during the war. But when the returning soldiers did not accept the daily humiliations of Jim Crow laws, many whites reacted violently. The events began on February 25, 1946, when a dissatisfied black customer, accompanied by her navy veteran son, got into a fight with a radio repair clerk who refused to address their concerns and became abusive. The clerk was pushed out the window, an act for which both the veteran and his mother were arrested. After pleading guilty and paying their fine, the two headed home. Later that day, the son was arrested again on more serious charges but was bailed out and released again.
That night, an angry white mob gathered near the black neighborhood. Blacks, including armed veterans, organized to protect themselves against possible attack. When four police officers attempted to disperse the crowd, they were shot and wounded. What followed was not uncharacteristic of the way law-enforcement agents reacted to racial tensions:
Within hours, state highway patrolmen and the state safety commissioner, Lynn Bomar, arrived in town. Together with some of the town’s whites, they surrounded the Mink Slide [black] district. During the early morning of February 26, highway patrolmen first entered the district. The officers fired randomly into buildings, stole cash and goods, searched homes without warrants, and took any guns, rifles, and shotguns they could find. When the sweep was over, more than one hundred blacks had been arrested, and about three hundred weapons from the black community had been confiscated. None of the accused were granted bail or allowed legal counsel.40
According to prisoners’ testimonies, three of the black prisoners were later taken for interrogation. Shots followed; one was injured, and the other two were killed. While the police officers claimed it was self-defense, fellow prisoners claimed that the men were executed in retaliation for their actions during the riots. Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s leading lawyer, who would be the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, immediately flew in with Walter White. They built a national defense committee (representing various organizations) whose mission was to provide funds and protection for the prisoners. They demanded that the alleged violations of black residents’ civil rights be investigated. Walter White then approached Eleanor to co-chair the committee with Channing Tobias, and she immediately agreed. Though occupied with her work for the United Nations, Eleanor participated in the committee’s defense efforts. In a letter she wrote with Channing Tobias to prospective donors, she summarized her views on the events. The men who were arrested, she argued, more than half of whom were recently discharged servicemen, had been
the innocent victims of race hatred and violence. The events which took place in Columbia on February 25th and 26th rose out of a dispute between a white shopkeeper and a Negro customer. They culminated in lynch threats, an armed invasion of the Negro district, wanton destruction of Negro property and wholesale arrests and beatings of Negro citizens.41
Thurgood Marshall’s spectacular defense saved many of the prisoners the injustice of long prison terms. But when he and others forced Tennessee Attorney General Tom C. Clark to investigate the actions of the National Guard unit and highway patrolmen who raided the black neighborhood, the results were deeply disappointing. Despite the fact that dozens of people witnessed the actions of the National Guard unit and patrolmen, blacks were not allowed to testify, and the white officers did not cooperate. The record of this investigation, Marshall later wrote to Eleanor, showed “that none of the witnesses . . . could identify any person responsible for the property damage which occurred or for any other act prohibited by Federal laws.”42 When Marshall left town, the police followed him and his colleagues. He was arrested for alleged drunk driving and was almost lynched by white residents of Columbia.
Responding to the maelstrom of violence, representatives of the African American community turned to the United Nations. W. E. B. Du Bois, a highly accomplished scholar and activist (he was the first African American to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard), led a team of lawyers and scholars who submitted a brief to the human rights division in 1947. It was titled “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.”
How, asked Du Bois, could the leaders of the United States seek to lead the free world while refusing to confront the injustices of racism in every American town and city? A “disastrous” policy, segregation, he wrote, had
repeatedly led the greatest modern attempt at democratic government to deny its political ideals, to falsify its philanthropic assertions and to make its religion to a great extent hypocritical. A nation which boldly declared “That all men are created equal,” proceeded to build its economy on chattel slavery; masters who declared race-mixture impossible, sold their own children to slavery and left a mulatto progeny which neither law nor science can today disentangle; churches which excused slavery as calling the heathen to god, refused to recognize the freedom of converts or admit them to equal communion. . . . [A] great nation, which today ought to be in the forefront of the march toward peace and democracy, finds itself continuously making common cause with race-hate, prejudiced exploitation, and oppression of the common man.43
America’s “high and noble words,” Du Bois concluded, had been “turned against it, because they are contradicted in every syllable by the treatment of the American Negro for three hundred and twenty-eight years.”44
“An Appeal to the World” was Du Bois’s plea for the international community to take notice of the ongoing discrimination, segregation, and racial violence in America. In writing and submitting it to the United Nations, Du Bois and his colleagues tried to shift from national and internal debate to an international and universal one. When arguing in court and protesting on the street, African Americans were fighting to receive their civil rights: rights granted to all the citizens of the United States but denied to them. Du Bois and the NAACP believed that the United Nations’ discussion of human rights was an opportunity to mobilize international public opinion for their cause and to align their plight with that of other oppressed people. This was neither the first nor the last such attempt to “internationalize” the injustices suffered by blacks.
The brief was to be submitted on October 23, 1947, to Humphrey as the director of the human rights division and to Henri Laugier of the Secretariat. Walter White, a longtime civil rights activist and the executive director of the NAACP, asked Eleanor to be present.45 She declined:
As an individual I should like to be present, but as a member of the delegation, I feel that until this subject comes before us in a proper way, in a report to the Human Rights Commission or otherwise, I should not seem to be lining myself up in any particular way on any subject.46
She added: “It isn’t as though everyone did not know where I stand.”47 For example, before taking up her duties at the United Nations, Eleanor had often identified racism directed at African Americans as intolerable. The situation had to change, and in 1942, she repeated demands she had made many times before—that every citizen of the United States should have the following rights:
- Equality before the law
- Equality of education
- Equality to hold a job according to his or her ability
- Equality of participation through the ballot in the government48
“We cannot force people to accept friends for whom they have no liking,” she argued, “but living in a democracy, it is entirely reasonable to demand that every citizen of that democracy enjoy the fundamental rights of a citizen.”49
In Eleanor’s essay, “Abolish Jim Crow,” she spoke about the need to align the ethical mission of the war with the struggle for justice at home, drawing parallels among the persecution of the European Jews, the Russian dissidents, and the American blacks.50 Moreover, since the war, Eleanor had often warned against the hypocrisy of condemning the Nazis for their racial policies while allowing the free reign of white supremacy in many areas of the United Sates. In a response to a member of President Truman’s commission on civil rights, she repeated the comparison: “We cannot look down too much on the Nazis or the Communists, when somewhere in our land things like this happen.”51 While Eleanor called for patience and for working within the system, but this did not mean that she went along with official decisions with which she disagreed: she knew how to dig in her heels and push back.
A case in point was the United States’ support for the formation of the state of Israel. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eleanor became convinced that this was the only appropriate response to horrific actions that had left six million Jews dead and had turned those who survived into unwanted, stateless refugees.52 So when the United States seemed as if it would withdraw its support for the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, Eleanor threatened her resignation from the United Nations.53
But “The Appeal to the World” put Eleanor in a tough position. She believed that receiving petitions from anyone but a member state violated the guidelines for the Human Rights Commission. The commission had never been assigned any executive power at all. Both human rights standards and the institutions that would act to uphold them were yet to be created. Moreover, Eleanor anticipated complications. She knew that the Soviets would use “The Appeal to the World” for anti-American propaganda (which they later did). In that case, if Eleanor sided with the petitioners, she would be set against the government she represented, which was unthinkable.
Nevertheless, Eleanor continued to communicate with White and Du Bois. She also agreed to meet Du Bois in person to talk things over. In their conversation, recorded by Du Bois, Eleanor repeated her concern about the potential abuse of the petition by the Soviets, and she pointed out that if the Soviets and other countries continued to attack the United States for its racial policies, she would be forced to defend those policies—a situation she deeply resented. According to Du Bois’s account, Eleanor said that the situation “might be so unpleasant that she would feel it necessary to resign from the United States Delegation to the United Nations.”54 Du Bois’s uncompromising position eventually led to a crisis within the NAACP and to the termination of his service. In his place, on September 7, 1948, the NAACP sent Walter White to consult with the United States delegation. His close ties with Eleanor were well known, and the choice suggested that the NAACP expected that she would continue to support the organization’s mission.55
The Politics of Words
When the drafting committee adjourned on June 25, 1947, it had produced a document that would serve as the starting point for many rounds of further talks and revisions, as well as many deadlocks, breakthroughs, hopes, and disappointments. The committee’s work was done, but before the full Human Rights Commission could begin the sequel, delegates knew they had to make a strategic decision. Eleanor had observed with dismay as the American public and its elected officials turned away from the international affairs. It was unlikely that Congress—so dominated by isolationists and southern segregationists—would approve any declaration of human rights except in gradual stages. So she proposed that the work should be broken up: first a nonbinding declaration, then a treaty, and last an enforcement mechanism would be put forward.
This view prevailed, and the commission broke into three working groups: declaration, treaty, and implementation. Though it would take 19 years to complete social-economic and civic-political human rights treaties, the Human Rights Commission forged ahead. Its second session took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Many believed that setting the conference in Europe, where the war’s atrocities had hardly faded, would give their work additional urgency.
The opening meeting took place on December 2, 1947. During the first session, Eleanor informed her colleagues at the HRC that the United States would not support the drafting of a legally binding “covenant” of human rights until the political conditions for its good-faith use materialized. She also said that “flagrant, prolonged, and repeated violations” of such conventions would certainly hurt the United Nations.56 The United States’ position was rejected, and the HRC broke up into the three working groups mentioned above. Charles Dukes (who became Lord Dukeston), of the United Kingdom, led the drafting of the covenant, and India’s Hansa Mehta headed the group that debated the ways in which human rights would be enforced and their violations addressed. Eleanor was to chair the drafting of a human rights declaration.
And that she did. Wasting no time, she told her colleagues:
I want to be home for Christmas, and I assume everyone else does, too. . . . In fact, I have made reservations, and I hope to keep them. If we work night sessions from the beginning, instead of waiting until the last week as usual, we should get through in time.57
Although the delegates muttered that the chairwoman’s schedule violated their human rights, they set to work and maintained a remarkable spirit of friendliness and cooperation over the ensuing weeks.58
If we look at the concerns that surrounded a single word, we get some idea of how cultural, political, and social ideals shaped the language of the Declaration. When the delegates opened their folders of the draft and took a look at Article 1, here is what they saw:
All men are brothers. They are endowed by nature with reason and conscience. They are born equal in dignity and rights.
The representative from India, Hansa Mehta, was concerned about use of the word “men.” A freedom fighter during her country’s recent struggle for independence, she imagined that the word would be interpreted in India and other countries to mean males alone. She questioned whether the word could be used to exclude women from enjoying the rights listed in the Declaration. Eleanor disagreed: the English term was inclusive of both men and women.59 For now, the wording did not change.
But nothing had really been settled. In the fall of 1948, when the final draft was debated by the Third Committee before it was brought to the General Assembly for adoption, several female delegates insisted that the Declaration’s language be “gender neutral.” They refused to back down, and the final version of Article 1 finally read “All human beings. . .” Eleanor later described how she came to accept this change:
The women on Committee III—and remember there were 58 representatives of governments in Committee III, not 18—58—and the women said ‘“all men,’ oh, no. In this document we are not going to say ‘all men’ because in some of our countries we are just struggling to recognition and equality. Some of us have come up to the top, but others have very little equality and recognition and freedom. If we say ‘all men,’ when we get home it will be ‘all men.’” So you will find in this Declaration that it starts with “all human beings” in Article I, and in all the other Articles it says “everyone,” “no one.” In the body of the Article, it occasionally says “his,” because to say “his or hers” each time was a little awkward, but it is very clearly understood that this applies to all human beings.60
Our attitudes and our prejudices are often built into the language we use every day. The twentieth century saw women gain voting rights, become wage earners, and achieve a position comparable to men’s in many nations around the world. Language, therefore, also underwent a transformation. Women were making forays into politics and public office—and the women sitting around the commission’s table were determined to use their new power to refashion the world, one word at a time.
Greater challenges, however, lay ahead, as the delegates from the Soviet Bloc and from the West retreated into hostile positions. In her memoirs, Eleanor reflected:
Over the years, in one capacity or another, I saw a great deal of the Russian delegates, and not infrequently, felt I saw and heard too much of them, because of course they were usually the center of opposition to [the American delegation’s] ideas.61
She devoted many lines to the diatribes delivered by “a big, dramatic man with flowing white hair and a bristling black beard—Dr. Alexei P. Pavlov.” She noted that Pavlov, a nephew of the famous physiologist, “was a brilliant talker,” but he often
arose with a flourish, shook his white locks angrily, and made a bitter attack on the United States on the basis of some report or even of some rumor that had to do with discrimination against Negroes, particularly in our southern states.62 Of course, I always replied vigorously, pointing out that, despite discrimination of one kind of another, the United States had done a great deal to improve the social and economic status of the Negro, but Dr. Pavlov never admitted any such improvement. On one occasion I took pains to explain that I had spent a good part of my own life fighting against discrimination, and working for education and other measures for the benefit of Negro citizens of the United States. But to everything I said, Dr. Pavlov replied by sticking out his black beard and barking:
“Yes, you worked. But where did it ever get you?”
Eleanor believed that these attacks were calculated to derail the work of the commission while “publicizing the Communist point of view.”63 Keeping the commission’s work on schedule while coping with a speaker whose “words rolled out of his black beard like a river” required all of Eleanor’s political skills.
On one occasion, it seemed to me that the rash accusations he brought up against the United States. . . . were proving a real detriment to our work. . . . I banged the gavel so hard that the other delegates jumped in surprise and, before he could continue, I got in a few words of my own. “We are here,” I said, “to devise ways of safeguarding human rights. We are not here to attack each other’s governments and I hope when we return on Monday the delegate of the Soviet Union will remember that!” I banged the gavel again. “Meeting adjourned!” 64
I can still see Dr. Pavlov staring at me in surprise. But this maneuver may have had some effect, because his orations were brief and to the point for about a week after that.65
While she rarely had to gavel delegates into silence, Eleanor did need to cope with the larger-than-life personalities in the Human Rights Commission, and her remarkable skill at doing so proved to be one of the keys to the group’s success. She was a principled and disciplined negotiator, which ensured that work proceeded professionally and smoothly. But there was no dodging or finessing certain hard questions, and before the end of the commission’s third and final session, the meeting room echoed with prolonged arguments.
During September 1948, supporters of the focus on civil and political rights argued with a newer generation committed to protecting social and economic rights. The first group drew its inspiration from British philosophers John Locke, James and John Stewart Mill, and other classical liberal thinkers. They supported these “old rights” and favored relatively weak government that did not interfere in the life of the common person. Precious to them were the right to hold property, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and protest, a legal system that proceeded rationally without any prejudice toward the accused, and the right to elect (and replace) government officials in accordance with the interest of the public.66
Social and economic rights, by contrast, became a fixture on national political agendas in the West with the rise of working-class politics in the late nineteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, many of the rural poor moved to towns and cities where they labored in factories. Exposed to dangerous machinery, toxic chemicals, and the whims of managers, these workers began to unionize in the late nineteenth century. They demanded higher wages, safer surroundings, and protection against injury and unemployment. Workers also formed political parties and labor unions, and in a few decades, they managed to win a number of important new social and economic rights including child labor laws and workplace safety laws.67
The distinctions between old and new rights were not very pronounced at the early stages of the drafting process, and many delegates believed that both needed to be written into the Declaration. Not least among these delegates was Henri Laugier, the assistant secretary general responsible for the United Nations’ social and economic affairs (as well as the human rights project). As early as April 1946, Laugier instructed the committee to address these new rights. He told them to
show that the political rights are the first condition of liberty, but that today the progress of scientific and industrial civilization has created economic organizations which are inflicting on politically free men intolerable servitude and that, therefore, in the future, the declaration of the rights of man must be extended to the economic and social fields.68
But many American officials argued that guarantees of social and economic rights would interfere with the fundamentals of the American economy. Some raised the specter of communism in response to nearly every government-sponsored social program. One of the strongest opponents of the inclusion of social and economic rights in the Declaration was Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. Indeed, Lovett opposed the creation of any international agreement on human rights; such agreements, he believed, ran contrary to the interests of the United States. These and other sentiments—isolationism and objection to international criticism of United States racial policies—account for the United States’ failure to ratify the Genocide Convention and a number of later international treaties.69
In spite of Eleanor’s best efforts, the delegates from the Soviet Union barraged the American and British delegates with criticism of their countries’ “ruthless” exploitation of the working poor. Other delegates—Santa Cruz, for example—promoted social and economic rights with far less drama and antagonism. Moreover, having helped her husband forge the New Deal in the 1930s, Eleanor was not opposed to government playing a role in the economy; she believed that such intervention had helped pull the American people out of the Great Depression.
When news from Moscow indicated that vast numbers of Russian citizens were being sent to prison camps on suspicion of dissent, Eleanor, evidently frustrated by Soviet disparagement, presented her view on the commission’s negotiations to a general audience. In a speech given at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1948, she said,
I think the best example one can give of this basic difference of the use of terms is “the right to work.” The Soviet Union insists that this is a basic right which it alone can guarantee, because it alone provides full employment by the government. But the right to work in the Soviet Union means the assignment of workers to do whatever task is given to them by the government, without an opportunity for the people to participate in the decision. . . .
We in the United States have come to realize it means freedom to choose one’s job, to work or not to work as one desires. We, in the United States, have come to realize, however, that people have a right to demand that their government will not allow them to starve because as individuals they cannot find work of the kind they are accustomed to doing. . . . But we would not consider in the United States that we had gained any freedom if we were compelled to follow a dictatorial assignment to work where and when we were told. The right of choice would seem to us an important, fundamental freedom.70
Months later, when the Human Rights Commission’s work was nearly done, Eleanor replied to yet another round of Soviet criticism by acidly demanding to know “if those in the USSR’s forced labor camps enjoyed paid vacations.”71 More typically, though, she tried to find compromise:
A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society, and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.72
That was why Eleanor insisted that labor rights, such as the right to organize without jeopardizing one’s income, were perfectly legitimate and needed to be included in the Declaration. And, as one expert claimed, “contrary to what many suppose today, it was Santa Cruz, far more than any Soviet Bloc representative, who was the Commission’s most zealous promoter of social and economic rights.”73
If Eleanor found negotiations with the Soviet delegates “tough,” she noted that she had “never felt any personal bitterness” toward them and that she was certain that, with time, the two camps would find common ground.74 And there was common ground: she believed there were some things that, within a complicated social and economic system, private citizens could not handle alone. “It is basic in a democracy,” she wrote, “that leadership for the welfare of the people as a whole must come from the government.” Long after right-wing critics of the New Deal had targeted her and Franklin as undercover socialists, she soberly stated “that a democracy must meet the needs of its people.”75
In the end, Article 23 read, “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.” This practical formulation satisfied the vast majority of the delegates, regardless of their cultural and political backgrounds.
Adoption
The United Nations’ Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Questions, known as the Third Committee, began its review of the Declaration on September 28, 1948, and spent almost the entire session debating the draft. In 85 meetings, it considered 170 amendments—but, fortunately, many members of the Human Rights Commission, including Eleanor, Malik, Chang, Cassin, and Pavlov, also served as delegates to the Third Committee, enabling the committee’s work to continue smoothly.76
When the Third Committee began to discuss the preamble (or introduction), Father Beaufort of the Netherlands moved that it should mention the divine origin of human beings and the immortal destiny of man. Both suggestions were entirely in keeping with Beaufort’s own faith, which taught that God had created human beings and endowed them with immortal souls. Nonbelievers, said Beaufort, could simply ignore the references to Christianity.
Of course, the declaration was not meant to speak only to Christians and non-believers; it was meant to speak to all people everywhere without regard to religious identities and beliefs. The first Human Rights Commission itself was comprised of 18 representatives of the world’s main religions and cultures, including those that were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and secular.80 “[W]hen it became clear to Father Beaufort that his amendment would not be supported by the majority of the committee, he withdrew it. The result was that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentioned neither God nor nature.”81 The passage in question, in the final version, stated plainly:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. . . . 82
After a long struggle between those who could not imagine a foundational document about rights that did not mention God and those who rejected such a mention, Eleanor fully appreciated the extraordinary delicacy needed to achieve consensus:
Now, I happen to believe that we are born free and equal in dignity and rights because there is a divine Creator, and there is a divine spark in men. But, there were other people around the table who wanted it expressed in such a way that they could think in their particular way about this question, and finally, these words were agreed upon because they stated the fact that all men were born free and equal, but they left it to each of us to put in our own reason, as we say, for that end.83
She insisted on the necessity of finding “the words that most people can say and that will accomplish the ends you desire, and will be acceptable to practically everyone sitting around the table, no matter what their background, no matter what their beliefs may be.”84
A similar conflict erupted over the first article in the Declaration. At a certain moment, months before, Article 1 had read:
All men are brothers. They are endowed by nature with reason and conscience. They are born equal in dignity and rights.
The first statement reflected the guiding ideals of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, and brotherhood). This was the work of the French representative, Cassin, who had added it as part of the process of revising Humphrey’s original. Now the Lebanese representative, Malik, suggested substituting the words “by their Creators” for “by nature” to echo a celebrated passage in the American Declaration of Independence. This would not do, said Cassin, because not all cultures believed that humans were created by a god or another higher power. In a subsequent account, Humphrey provided some background:
At the second session of the Human Rights Commission, and again at the second session of the drafting committee, Malik had unsuccessfully tried to bring a reference to the Creator into the article on the family. Now it was the Brazilian delegation which wanted Article 1 to say that human beings are created in the image of God. The article, as it then stood, said that human beings are endowed “by nature” with reason and conscience, and the Brazilians wanted this statement to be preceded by a reference to the deity.85
Naturally, many of the delegates represented countries where a single creed accounted for the vast majority of the population; Brazil, for example, has been predominantly Roman Catholic since the sixteenth century. Other delegates, such as those from socialist states, had formally rejected all conventional religion. If one believed that God’s creation of humans in his own image provided the foundation for all rights and principles, it would not be easy to sit on one’s hands at such a moment.
After the long debate regarding Article 1, another major controversy over religion arose when the group began to review Article 18, which addressed religious liberty. As Humphrey acknowledged, “Something as important as religion, which is so intimately related to the life of the individual and which has played such a role, for good and for bad, in the long struggle for human rights, could not be ignored by the Declaration.”86 Malik, whose country was divided between Christians and Muslims, appealed to his colleagues to endorse the right to change religions.87 But another Lebanese Christian, who represented Saudi Arabia, objected to this clause. Jamil Baroody, a colorful speaker, was concerned about the “proselytizing activities of missionaries who were often the precursors of foreign intervention; and to include the principle would also be an affront to Muslims, since the Koran forbade them to change their religion.”88 Despite the opposition of several Muslim-majority states, Malik’s clause was approved.
The leader of the delegation from Pakistan worked to bridge the differences. Eleanor recalled, “Fortunately, we consulted with Sir Zafrulla Khan, who courageously rose during the final vote in Committee Three to defend the Declaration.” Pakistan was the largest Muslim nation present, and Khan’s position carried a lot of weight. “It is my opinion,” he declared, “that our Pakistan delegate [who rejected Article 18] has misinterpreted the Koran. I understand the Koran to say: ‘He who can believe shall believe; he who cannot believe shall disbelieve; the only unforgivable sin is to be a hypocrite.’ I shall vote for acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”89 Article 18 therefore reads:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
After almost a year of work, on December 10, 1948, just two days before the close of the Paris session, the General Assembly voted to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
As the General Assembly rose to give her a standing ovation, a radiant smile illuminated Eleanor Roosevelt’s weary face. In future years, she would always consider her chairmanship of the committee that drafted the Declaration as her most important achievement and a culmination of her life’s work.90
Although no country voted against the Universal Declaration in the General Assembly—a remarkable success, particularly when one reflects on all of the disputes along the way—eight countries abstained. Among them were the Soviet Union and its allies—Czechoslovakia, Byelorussia, Poland, and the Ukraine. According to Eleanor, the Soviet delegation explained its vote by contending that the Declaration “put emphasis mainly on ‘eighteenth-century rights’ and not enough on economic, social, and cultural rights.”91
Yugoslavia and Saudi Arabia also declined to vote. The delegate from the latter justified his abstention as a rejection of Zafrulla Khan’s interpretation of the Koran. South Africa was the final abstention, explaining that though “they hoped to give their people basic human rights . . . the Declaration went too far.”92 This was to be expected, since an aggressively racist party had won the general election in South Africa some months earlier and would soon pass a vast collection of laws reinforcing the racial discrimination that was long the norm in that nation. This system, called apartheid, greatly restricted the human rights of black South Africans as well as other racial minorities.
But Eleanor did not dwell on the abstentions:
Despite these difficulties, despite these variations in attitudes and customs and historic precedents, we have produced a document of very great intrinsic worth. The United States has not always won its points. The Declaration is not exactly as we would have written it; on the other hand, no two Americans would have written it in the same way. But it is a sure guide. It is not unlikely that it will be of historic importance.93
Despite the claims of her early critics, she had risen above the narrow interests of her country and culture, inspiring other members of the commission to do the same. Even Humphrey, whose diaries are filled with critical remarks about her (and just about everybody else), called her “a symbol that stood above this quarrel”—he meant the Cold War.94
After the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor finally resigned from her position as chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission. “It seemed to me,” she later wrote,
that the United States had held the chairmanship of the Commission on Human Rights long enough. So at the 1951 meeting of the Commission in Geneva, I nominated Charles Malik of Lebanon, with the consent of my government. He was elected, and from then on I was just a member, but a most interested member, for I believed the Human Rights Commission was one of the very important parts of the foundation on which the United Nations might build a peaceful world.95